


Take my hand and never let go

by Askellie



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Consensual Incest, Fellcest - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Underfell Papyrus (Undertale), Underfell Papyrus/Underfell Sans (Undertale), Underfell Sans (Undertale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:14:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28757922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askellie/pseuds/Askellie
Summary: “We’re getting out, Pap,” he says, curling his cracked fingers against the wall. “I promise. And you know how I feel about promises.”Papyrus doesn’t respond. There’s nothing but his breathing, shallow and weak. Sans hopes he’s sleeping, getting whatever rest he can to bolster his strength. In the meantime, he goes back to scrutinising every inch of his cell, looking for the smallest crack, any hint of imperfection, the smallest sliver of hope.He doesn’t find any.
Relationships: Papyrus/Sans (Undertale)
Kudos: 33





	Take my hand and never let go

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was originally created for the Undertale Gore Zine [Lattices & Cracks](https://lattices-and-cracks.itch.io/fanzine). I got to collaborate with the immensely talented [Cognito](https://twitter.com/sinncognito) who did incredible illustrations to accompany my fic. You can see the full piece by downloading the zine [here](https://lattices-and-cracks.itch.io/).
> 
> Make sure you read all the warnings on both this fic and the zine itself! It was created very purposefully for those of us who enjoy dark themes, blood and gore. If that's your jam (because it's totally mine) I highly recommend it!

Sans can hear Papyrus breathing in the next cell over, one harsh, ragged breath at a time. He strains his hearing for any hint of sound. Is that something dripping onto the floor? Is that the crack of a splintered bone? He doesn’t know what happens each time the guards drag Papyrus out for another session. Papyrus won’t tell him no matter how much he cajoles or pleads. Sans doesn’t know if he should be grateful.

Instead of fretting he tries to make himself useful and spends his time compulsively examining the boundaries of his tiny prison for any weakness. He pokes at the lock on the door but it’s some kind of sealed, latchless box without any seams or screws to pry at. He’d snap a finger and use the splinters as lockpicks in a soulbeat -- anything to get to Papyrus -- but there’s not even a keyhole for him to attempt it.

Papyrus coughs -- a wet, wracking sound -- and Sans freezes. Waiting for the coughing fit to pass is its own kind of agony, but Sans endures. He has to. He must be too fragile for whatever torture they’re putting his brother through because they’ve left him alone so far, but Papyrus shouldn’t suffer alone.

It takes Papyrus a long minute to catch his breath, and when he speaks his voice is barely above a whisper. “Sans.”

“I’m here, bro,” he calls back, pressing himself to the wall. He imagines his brother on the other side, separated by only a foot or so of concrete and steel. He’s already tried clawing through it in a fit of maddened ferocity, and only stopped when Papyrus ordered him to knock it the fuck off. There are still bloody smears on the wall from his attempt. His fingers sting and itch between the phalanges where the blood has dried.

“If…” Papyrus begins heavily, the word enunciated with absolute care, like he’s having trouble with either his voice or his concentration. “...Just in case… There may not be another opportunity. I want to tell you--”

“Don’t.” Sans snaps it with more venom than he intends, fighting down panic, nausea. He doesn’t want to hear his brother say it. “Don’t tell me stupid shit. Save it for when we’re out of here.”

“Sans--”

“Don’t,” he repeats more vehemently. His voice threatens to crack on the word. “We’re getting out, and we’re going to kill these assholes and throw their dust in the dump where they fucking belong!”

Papyrus laughs. It’s strained, wheezy. The noise breaks Sans’s heart more than if he’d scoffed at Sans’s stupidity.

“Fine,” Papyrus says, sounding a fraction more like his usual self. “Idiot.”

There’s so much affection layered into the word that Sans almost crumbles, but he can’t. He won’t. He won’t give these bastards the satisfaction of breaking him when they haven’t even touched him. He  _ won’t _ , even though knowing his brother in agony is far worse than anything Sans could suffer himself.

“We’re getting out, Pap,” he says, curling his cracked fingers against the wall. “I promise. And you know how I feel about promises.”

Papyrus doesn’t respond. There’s nothing but his breathing, shallow and weak. Sans hopes he’s sleeping, getting whatever rest he can to bolster his strength. In the meantime, he goes back to scrutinising every inch of his cell, looking for the smallest crack, any hint of imperfection, the smallest sliver of hope.

He doesn’t find any.

Hours later, the guards return heralded by the clank of armour and sturdy march of footsteps. Sans shouts obscenities at them, bangs his fists on the cell bars, tries to divert their attention. They ignore him as they have every time before. He hears them opening Papyrus’s cell. There’s the heavy scrape of a body being dragged. Then their footsteps, receding.

Sans sits awake for hours, waiting, but Papyrus is never brought back.

When they finally,  _ finally _ come for him, Sans is ready. There is only one thought in his skull, and that’s to dust any asshole who comes within reach or die trying.

Unfortunately, the guards are just as prepared. The wall of green magic halts him mid-leap. The follow-up jolt of a stun baton leaves him writhing in absolute agony until another sharp strike to the skull renders him senseless.

* * *

When he wakes up, it’s on an examination table, the metal cold under his bare scapulae. The absence of his clothes concerns him, but only in an abstract way. He’s much more unsettled by the thick needle gouged through his arm, allowing a drip-feeder entry into his marrow. Beside him is Alphys, and the absolute fury he feels at the sight of her is a livid heat that sparks in his soul like it’s trying to burst from his chest.

“You BITCH,” he screeches. The metal cuffs bite into his bones as he tries to lunge for her. “You COWARD! TRAITOR! I TRUSTED YOU!”

Alphys turns to look at him mildly. Her eyes are empty, almost lifeless except for a faint curiosity. She jots something down on her clipboard, oblivious to his insults and screaming.

So he tries a different tactic. “Does Undyne know what you did? He was her lieutenant! Her FRIEND! Have you told her that you… that he’s…”

As much as he wants to hurt her he can’t say the words. They’re not real yet. Not until he sees his brother’s dust.

“It doesn’t matter,” Alphys says, her voice utterly flat. Her dead eyes squint down at Sans like she’s peering down the lens of a microscope. “He was only a Guardsman. Replaceable. And she doesn’t need any friends. Friends are weaknesses.”

“Is that what  _ he _ told you?” Sans hisses, writhing against his bonds. His wrists are already bleeding but he doesn’t feel the pain. “That miserable bastard of a tyrant--”

“Don’t,” she says, her voice suddenly loud, firm. Her eyes burn with fervor. It sickens him. “Don’t disrespect our King. He will free us, and when he does, he’ll need the right weapons to take down the humans.”

Sans laughs. “Is that what you’re trying to do here? Sorry, sweetheart, but if you’re trying to find a way to mass produce  _ judgement _ , it don’t work like that.”

“I know,” Alphys replies, falling back into her unnatural calm. “There will only ever be one Judge, and for now that Judge is you. Be glad you’re too valuable a host for us to terminate you prematurely. It often takes years for another Judge to rise, so we can’t afford to waste you.”

“Whatever you’re gonna try ain’t happening,” he tells her bluntly. He might be afraid if it weren’t buried so far beneath his rage. “Dunno what you think you can gain by leaving me alive, but the only thing I’ll ever give you is the dusting you deserve.”

She turns away to adjust something on the IV bag attached to the tube in his arm. “Your attitude is undesirable for the outcome of this project. It will be addressed eventually once we take care of the rest of your shortcomings.”

He opens his mouth to retort, prepared to unleash a new litany of blistering curses, but whatever she’s given him acts quickly. His words slur into an incomprehensible mess as his body goes numb. The surface of the table drops out from under him. And then he’s free-falling into oblivion, his consciousness sinking into a void of unrelenting darkness.

* * *

When he comes awake again it’s like eons have passed. His bones feel like they’ve been encased in cement: unbearably heavy, each joint grinding as he starts to stir. He feels like utter shit, and he starts to wonder if this is how Papyrus felt every time they brought him back. He wants to call out and ask before his mind helpfully reminds him that Papyrus isn’t there anymore. It’s a very matter-of-fact thought, which tells him that whatever Alphys drugged him with hasn’t worn off enough for reality to have properly sunk in again. It makes him wonder how much pain he’d actually be in if he weren’t still half-drugged out of his mind.

His vision is blurry and mostly useless. The most he can discern is that he’s probably back in his cell, if only because he’s become painfully familiar with the grey of the walls. He’s lying on his back, which is hell on his spine, so he tries to lever himself into a sitting position. The simple task feels absurdly difficult, mostly because his arms don’t seem to have woken up along with the rest of him. They’re dead weights. He doesn’t have Undyne’s rock-hard abdominals, so his method of sitting up mostly involves rolling around like a slug and then using the wall for leverage as he inches his way upwards using his face and chest.

His foot slips on the concrete floor, interrupting his clumsy attempt and knocking his shoulder against the wall. Pain scythes through him, hot and sharp. The ceiling rings with Sans’s startled shout. It’s so bad he feels nauseous, his empty stomach trying to turn itself inside out. It’s not until he looks down at his arms for the first time that he realises that there’s something very seriously wrong.

For an absurd, surreal moment, he thinks his humeri are swollen. They look longer and thicker than they should, the enlarged cap of the head forcing his collarbone and scapulae out of place. It reminds him of Aaron and the magic-enhancers that augmented his already muscular physique -- a pathetic tactic to deter a real FIGHT. 

But those drugs wouldn’t work the same way on Sans; bone doesn’t expand like muscle tissue. His arms are larger, humeri extending further than they should, almost down to his waist. If he were able to stand, his fingers would hang down closer to his knees. His arms look ridiculously long for his compact frame, their length almost comical until his wavering eyelights finally catch on the details.

Steel screws have been drilled into his bones, fusing each joint with wires running from his phalanges all the way up to his shoulders. But it’s not that, or the mottled spiderweb of cracks and bruises around each screw, that horrifies him.

It’s the scars.

They’d be easy to overlook beneath more recent signs of abuse, but Sans recognises each one despite how rarely his brother ever removed his gloves. Each is a memory, a time when Sans wrapped his brother’s bones in bandages while bitching about stupid carelessness, or -- more rarely, kissed the marks that should never have touched an innocent babybones. He knows that jagged scar across the palm where Papyrus caught the blade of one of the maddened Dogi, and that distinct break in the radius from surviving Undyne’s test to allow him into the Guard.

These aren’t his arms.

They’re his  _ brother’s _ arms, dismembered and restrung like the limbs of a puppet before being sewn onto his body.

Sans tries to shake them off with a violence verging on madness. They’re not his, they belong to Papyrus,  _ where is Papyrus _ \--?

The arms simply swing listlessly in place. They’re not coming off. Not without a set of pliers or a drill to tear out the bolts. The arms are attached to  _ him _ , not to his brother, which means Papyrus is… He must be...

The horrific reality of the situation sinks in -- and all of a sudden Sans can’t hold back the terrible sound that breaks from his throat: anger, and grief, and loss, and despair.

The screaming doesn’t stop for a long time.

* * *

“Can you feel this?” Alphys asks. The silicone hammer taps insistently against Sans’s knuckles, but all he can feel is the faint tremor through the connecting wires. There’s no sensation from the bone itself, not that he would care to tell her if there was. He stares silently at the far wall, face fixed in a sneer.

“HP is up by 57 points, which means the graft was a success,” Alphys mutters to herself. “No sign of reflex in the transplanted limbs… Have the nerve endings stopped functioning?”

The wire-strung bones are nothing more than dead weight to Sans, unfeeling and immobile. It’s better this way. He can’t think of them as his, just as temporary inconveniences that Alphys has welded onto his body. The constant, thrumming pain makes it difficult to ignore them, but he’s giving the attempt all he’s got.

“Experiment number twenty-three,” Alphys dictates to the recording device poised over the chair Sans is strapped to. “Exploring the possibility that the sensory capabilities of the transplanted limbs were impaired during transfer. Low voltage stimulation should result in involuntary contraction unless the nerves have deteriorated since removal from the original host.”

Sans doesn’t care about the loss of his hands except for how desperately he’d love to wrap his fingers around Alphys’s neck and strangle the life out of her for reducing his brother’s precious life to being the donor of his new arms. He doesn’t react as she readies a palm-sized device whose tip crackles with electricity and presses it against his radius.

He isn’t expecting a reaction. He doesn’t think Alphys is either -- at least not the violent one she receives. The strap at his wrist was only a perfunctory, unnecessary precaution, but his arm spasms and snaps it easily. Sans yelps as electricity surges through the wires in his bone, searing the metal, but the flailing of his arm isn’t just the mindless reflex of contracting muscle. With dazed fascination, he watches his hand--

_ (Papyrus’s hand) _

\--flex and curl into a resolute fist before lashing out. Its sharpened knuckles cut through the air, narrowly missing Alphys as she staggers backwards. It thrashes through the air, lashing out with wild abandon at invisible threats before it curls back on itself like it’s trying to find some plane of orientation. The hand makes contact with Sans’s ribs in a blow that steals his breath and ricochets off his bones.

The fingers latch onto Sans’s cervicals. They tighten their grip.

Sans’s sockets go wide, his spine convulsing. He doesn’t even try to resist. There’s no more collar to protect his throat, but the phalanges locked around his neck are exhilaratingly familiar. He chokes weakly, spittle seeping from his mouth, but even then his generous buffer of artificial HP doesn’t dip the slightest fraction of a point.

(Because there’s no intent, and only the Boss could do something like that, choke Sans without killing him and make him love it. It sets fire to his magic, sparking a heat in his pelvis of immediate arousal as he bucks and arches into that magnificent, unrelenting pressure.)

“No!”

Distantly he hears Alphys wail, and a moment later her claws are pawing at his neck, trying to pry the strangling hand away. Her eyes are wild, not with fear for him, but fear for herself. Failure often comes with the penalty of dusting on Asgore’s trident; all the more reason to give himself up to the sweet, crushing release of the hand at his throat.

(Papyrus would give him this mercy. Papyrus would want them to be together, in death as they were in life.)

But in the next moment, the hand transfers its attention from his neck to Alphys’s. The phalanges’ sharpened tips sink into her flesh with a gruesome squelch. Sans’s first gasping breath breaks into hysterical, exhilarated laughter as he watches her eyes pop and bulge, her mouth twisting in an ugly grimace.

Unfortunately her lab technicians step in before any lasting damage is done, tearing Papyrus’s hand from her throat and dragging her to safety while Sans cackles in savage delight.

For the first time, he can feel something beyond the agony of the screws and wires; the sticky heat of Alphys’s blood on his fingertips.

* * *

After a freezing decontamination shower he’s shoved back into his cell, left sprawled out on the floor. Sans doesn’t try to move even though his body is wracked with shivers. The cold wouldn’t kill him even if he were walking stark naked through a Snowdin blizzard.

The temperature isn’t the problem; what he really can’t stand is the silence from the adjoining cell. Usually this would be the time when Papyrus would start bitching about the cramps in his legs from inactivity, the greasy film on his bones from lack of showering, Sans’s snoring keeping him awake for hours. Sans is drowning in the silence, trying not to think of Papyrus’s last words, his desperate attempt to give Sans something better to hold onto.

( _ Idiot _ , he’d said, and Sans feels like one. He’d give another limb for Papyrus to tell him he loved him one last time.)

He’s so busy wallowing in his own misery that he doesn’t notice the movement of his arms at first. Ever since Alphys’s little experiment, he’s been getting back sensation in painful increments. Everything is still steeped in a dull ache, but now at least he can feel those fragile connections from his shoulders to his fingertips.

It’s the tension in his hands that rouses him from his dull stupor. His carpals and metacarpals are stretched wide, like satellite dishes trying to capture every signal of feedback as they tentatively fumble their way up his body. They map him out, starting low on his femurs and working their way upwards, not with the senseless violence of their earlier outburst, but with care and curiosity. He’s reminded of the cursory way Boss would pat him down at the end of a long day, reacquainting himself with Sans’s body, reclaiming it from the outside world.

Sans doesn’t flinch when the groping hands reach his neck, even though his cervicals are still tender from the earlier abuse. He can feel the heat of the bruises, and the pressure on them feels unrepentantly good. He groans a little, baring his neck further in invitation.

(The world feels distant, surreal and soft. He might be half-awake or he might be dreaming. He might be groping perversely at his own throat in a sad and desperate attempt to reclaim the shadow of a good memory.

Or maybe it’s not him guiding those familiar fingers with a care that only one monster has ever given him.)

Scarred knuckles scrape against his face in rough affection, and unthinkingly Sans licks at them. Faintly, between the bones where the shower didn’t quite reach, he catches a hit of metallic bitterness; blood caught on the wires holding him together. It makes him groan, the chill driven from his bones as everything goes pleasantly warm.

His other hand is working its way back downward. There’s an unfamiliar creak and click as it moves, a robotic sound he does his best to ignore as the touch alights on the crest of his ilium before sliding its way down to his pubic mound. It lingers there, like it’s debating the merits of continuing: exactly the kind of bullshit Papyrus used to pull on him when he thought Sans was too strung out or worn down to take it. His hips twitch in wordless demand, bucking into that careful hold.

He doesn’t care that there are probably cameras in the cell. He doesn’t care how obscene, how utterly fucked up it is to be rutting against his brother’s dismembered parts. He doesn’t care whether he’s imagining it or not. Boss’s hands are on him again, driving him to a brutal edge with painstaking care. They know exactly what he likes. Exactly what to do to bring him off with a merciless efficiency that brings tears to Sans’s eyes and drags a raw sob from his throat.

Sans gives in. He can’t stop himself. He promises it’s only a temporary reprieve before he starts to burn the world.


End file.
